handfuls of dust
by kintsugii
Summary: Wes and Michael didn't save the day. Or, Orre: the story of a woman, a girl, a ghost, and the desert world they burn for warmth.
1. your shadow at evening

**.**

* * *

**A WOMAN  
i. your shadow at evening**

⁂

The most horrific thing about the monster is how closely it resembles a human.

It has enough features to make it unrecognizable if she doesn't look too carefully: the coarse mass of static-filled yellow fur that splits its silhouette into harsh, disjointed limbs; the knife-like claws on both of its oversized feet; the way that its tail, banded in shocks of gold and black, lashes wildly behind it with a mind of its own. But she _is_ looking too closely, so she can't help but see herself in the skewered electabuzz's hunched shoulders and its defiantly curled fists and its narrowed eyes—

_all the better to see you with_

—Astra can't help it. She looks away. Her blade yanks upward and then outward, ripping back out of the creature's chest. It slumps to the ground, electricity fizzling weakly between its horns. She looks back when she hears the thud. It isn't a strange sight to her any more, but it hasn't gotten any easier in the passing years. Astra steps heavily over the electabuzz's body and walks toward the smoking settlement, feeling the rich scent of ozone settling around her. She keeps the sword drawn warily, even as the electabuzz's blood sizzles away on its surface.

Asi is thirstier than normal; before today, the blade hadn't tasted flesh in weeks. Astra can feel its weight on her arm, can hear its parched growls almost like a heartbeat deeply in synch with her own. She's started to understand the ebb and flow of the sword better. Enough to know that when it gets to this point, where the dark blue of its tassel is wrapped so tightly around her forearm that she can barely feel her own blood in her fingertips, she needs to give Asi something soon. If she doesn't, it will start to pull the blood from the only place it can find, until it sucks her dry.

That's what happened to the last wielder. Astra's lasted longer than most.

_Soon_, she almost whispers back to the blade, but she licks her chapped lips against the blistering wind instead. They both know that soon is never soon enough, and that even now, it craves more.

There's a rumble of thunder in the distance, one that comes not from the cloudless desert sky above, but from the ruined houses below. She starts running, past the limp body of a jolteon, past the corpse of a middle-aged man that's been smeared across fifteen feet of sandstone. Past the charred rubble of what was once a town, past the broken road, past the furrows that looked like they'd been smitten from the heavens. Astra can almost pity them. But the people of Quartzite were foolish, trying to keep a settlement this far out in the wastes. Pyrite, and the scant protection that it still offers, is a good thirty miles west of here. An altogether human arrogance led them to believe that it'd be safe to teeter this far out into the dark, as if the outlands of Orre didn't have teeth and claws and the power to bend nature to its will.

The thunder rumbles again. Closer, this time. Astra can feel the electricity rising in the air, tingling all the way up Asi's hilt, around the tassel that binds them together, and up to the hairs on the back of her neck, standing sharply at attention. Whatever's down there is stronger, much stronger, than what she's been picking off up here.

Asi, thirsty as ever, tugs her down towards it.

She hears the clash before she sees it, feels the reverberations of a collision emanating so loudly that she can feel the echoes tingling up her bones even after the sound fades. There's a prolonged shriek, not quite like anything she's ever heard before—this one is long, drawn out, some strange mix of the bass undertones of a charizard interwoven with the keening trill of an electabuzz.

And then she hears a sound that sends chills down her spine, one that makes her more afraid than any of the bloodied monsters she's seen today. She's seen a dozen villages burn in the past year, but she's never heard a sound like this here, never expected it, never told herself what she'd think when she finally—

Hears the defiant, countering scream of a human.

Here's the thing about humans, the lesson Astra learned the hard way. They might never have gotten the blessings the way that pokémon did, may never have been given teeth and claws and sheer _power_. But what they did get was far worse, far more deadly, far more beneficial in keeping them alive in this hellscape.

She sees the girl first, a tiny wisp of a thing, probably no more than thirteen. She's got the same gaunt body that all the survivors do; hunger's carved her features sharply into her face. Her face is smeared with a thin patina of ash and blood.

Astra sees the golem unfurl second. It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it sort of affair: one second, the girl is raising her arm skyward, where it silhouettes against the desert sun, and the next second, there's a huge explosion of metal as a huge, hulking humanoid figure seems to form out of shards of metal around her tiny form. She's dwarfed by the creature that constructs itself beside her, brandishing a pair of fists that individually are larger than her entire body.

She sees the electivire third, mentally thanks her time with Cipher for giving her a name for this monstrosity. Where the electabuzz was lean and wiry, this one's hulking and oversized. Tangles of fur bristle with static. Fists the size of car tires are slowly flexing and unflexing in the face of its new foe.

When the gods parceled out their gifts and saw fit to place defanged, slow bipeds on the same earth as a fifty-foot aquatic dragon capable of levelling mountains, they gave the bipeds only tenacity. And somehow that proved enough. Kick a pidgey out of the nest and it'll fly away. Defeat an arcanine for the right to rule the pack and it'll stay down and lick its wounds, keep its head low for the new alpha. But humans, well. Kick it out of its nest and it'll build a new, bigger one. With necks too short to lick their wounds, there was never a defeat, no matter how many times you pushed them down, until every last one of them was dead.

This was why places like Orre would never truly settle, not as long as humanity remembered that they'd once had a foothold. It didn't matter if the pokémon had suddenly mutated into uncontrollable killing machines that could reject pokéballs. It didn't matter if these monstrous shadow pokémon were more powerful, more vicious, than their tamed counterparts, and filled the biological niche that Orre had once lacked—that of apex predators. It didn't matter if shadow pokémon had received the one gift that their creators could give, and that they had the same desire to defend and destroy. All that mattered was that humanity had tenacity still, and they had the memory of a time they'd been pushed back.

"Shy!" the girl is screaming, pointing the mechanical pokémon toward the real one like it's some sort of farce of what they used to call battling. Not like she's old enough to remember.

Astra weighs her options. Electivire tails sell for a fair amount in the Under. Something about the capacitance. But she isn't sure there's a price high enough that'll make her fight the kid for it. The golem looks vicious.

Asi has different thoughts. It wants all three of them, and it tugs at her arm insistently. She grits her teeth. Time to feed, then.

The electivire catches sight of her first; she's approaching the girl and the golem from behind. She sees the comprehension dawn across its face as it's about to wind up a solid punch at the golem's midsection. Instead, it aims its blow downward, slamming one electrified fist into the ground. A spray of sand rises up, spitting into Astra's eyes and making her pause her assault.

Unfazed, the mechanical humanoid barrels onward. Fists erupt into flashes of silvery light, propelling it easily over the makeshift barricade and clipping the electivire between the eyes. The electric pokémon screeches in pain, but then its twin tails lash upward and wrap tightly around the golem's arms.

Astra knows what's coming next. She shields her face.

Blue arcs of electricity course between the electivire and the girl's golem, so bright that they wash out the shadows in the red desert beneath her feet. She can hear the girl shriek in pain from behind her, but Astra's already moving. There won't be a better opening. She surges forward, steel-toed boots making heavy impact on the ground, and then she lets Asi guide her hand toward the electivire's heart. Distracted as the electivire is with its first target, it doesn't notice her until it's too late, and Asi's already buried halfway up the hilt in its chest.

The electivire responds by raising its arm and punching her in the ribs. She flies back, ripping Asi with her, and blood begins to spurt freely from where she'd hit it, watering the parched earth.

Asi drinks deep, too. She feels its strength growing, understands what will happen now that it's gotten a taste of an opponent. The metal has claimed its offering. The course is set now, as inevitable as water flowing downhill.

She finds herself staring at the hilt of the sword as the blood slowly drains across the surface, desperately wills it to focus on that and not the thin crimson trickle that's leaking out from where the electivire threw her into the rock. Astra's mind goes in a million directions at once, sends her images of the girl kneeling frantically at the side of her mechanical companion, trying to repair the sizzling hole in its midsection. Flashes over to the hulking yellow monster pounding its fists across its chest, spurting electrical sparks across its own body. Reminds her of the study Cipher had once done on pokémon with the ability to absorb electrical energy and convert it into kinetic energy—

Oh.

Then the electivire is running at her on all fours, fingers gouging great holes into the ground. She isn't sure if it's her vision that's causing the tremors or the weight of the pokémon barreling towards her. Blearily, she points Asi forward, but the blade is suddenly so, so heavy in her hands.

Up. She has to get up.

The golem is suddenly back, lumbering across the ground like an with steps so heavy that the entire earth seems to shake, and it bodily tackles the electivire to the ground. It isn't enough to knock it entirely off course—stopping it with a body would be like jumping in front of a train—but it's enough to send them both skidding into the dirt beside her, enough to jolt Astra out of her half-concussed state. She scrambles to her feet. Limps to the pair of downed fighters on the ground. Raises Asi high, and then lets it plunge back into the electivire's neck, tracing out a crimson smile across its throat.

She collapses to the ground, breathing heavily. She can feel Asi chuckling beside her, and she lets the blade drink deep.

Behind her, the girl screams. Short footsteps announce her arrival, and then she's shoving Astra out of the way, hands threading into the electivire's matted fur. At first, her words are so frantic that Astra can't even understand them, but even when the girl slows down, they don't make any sense, rattle around in her head alongside the rest of her thoughts: "I didn't think you were going to _kill_ it!"

Astra's so stunned she doesn't even bother responding for a second. She looks between the weapons both she and the girl have fashioned for themselves—Asi, with its unquenchable thirst and eversharp blade; the golem, with its huge figure and enormous fists. What did they claim these weapons for if not for blood?

"What were you going to do?" Astra asks at last. Her voice is cracked with disuse.

The girl's still got her head bowed, trying to staunch the electivire's wound even as its lifeblood drains into the thirsty earth around her. Splashes of hot, red blood lace around her wrists like henna. "I… I thought we could hit it hard enough and… and convince it to stop being so violent."

They're both heavily concussed. That's the only reason Astra could be hearing this bullshit the way she is. She makes a point to look at the cratered settlement around her. It wasn't very big—probably twenty or thirty people before it was destroyed—but that wasn't the aftermath of something that could be convinced.

Astra sighs. "Where are your parents, girl?"

The girl stiffens. One hand points toward a pile of rubble.

Of course. Astra doesn't have time for this. She heaves herself over to the electivire's feet, where its twin tails snake out from beneath its legs. The blood hasn't stained them yet, but if she doesn't harvest them soon, they'll get soaked, and the smell will be permanent. Which, she's been told, ruins the price. "Then let me teach you something that they didn't," she says darkly. She severs the tails with a swift slash from Asi. "You don't _save_ things that can _kill_ you. You can't."

The girl doesn't look up. One bloodied hand is leaving streaked fingerprints across the hull of her metallic companion. A robot, perhaps? It's too reserved to be a pokémon; it's eyes are yellowed, foreign, but there's too much understanding in them for it to be shadowed. "I don't believe that."

Once upon a time, Orre had believed in heroes. There'd been plucky kids and brave adventures and everything in between. Astra had watched the news; she remembered what it was like. But it'd all been hopeless in the end—humanity had inadvertently been creating their own worst nightmare. In patiently believing that pokémon would help them gain greater power, in trusting in something stronger than themselves, they'd all collectively sealed their fates.

That's how they'd lost the first time. When the plucky heroes thought that their beloved companions could be saved, rather than slain. And then they'd all lost.

Astra bends down and picks up the electivire's tails with her free hand. Pretends not to be off-put by the way that the golem's fingers are twitching insistently, as if it's still powering itself back on. "You will, soon."

The girl looks up this time, and fixes Astra with eyes that are too resolute to understand the truths everyone in Orre already knows, too black to be fully human. "I don't," she repeats, "believe in that."

Astra sees it written all over the girl's eyes, all across her face and her unnaturally-bright hair—shocks of gold and black—and the realization washes over her like a cold blast of wind. She shivers despite the searing heat. Looks over at the twitching hull of the golem's bluish steel. Connects the dots. The two of them look like they'd crossed into the uncanny valley because they _had_; the girl and her golem look too humanoid for a pokémon and too pokémon to be human and yet—

After people realized that pokémon weren't enough to stop shadow pokémon, they tried something stupider, something far more desperate.

Someone, somewhere, had realized that if they couldn't safely give resolve to creatures with power, like pokémon, they could try giving the power to the things with tenacity instead.

"You're one of them, aren't you?" Astra asks heavily. "A morph, right?" She should've known back when she'd heard the thunder; electivire only go for ranged attacks when they feel threatened.

The girl seems to make some sort of understanding deep inside of herself, and then she nods.

This time, it isn't Asi who lunges forward when the blade aims for the throat. It's Astra.

She doesn't close her eyes this time. It's the least she can do, facing this monster that so closely resembles a girl.

But she can't save the things that can kill her.

⁂

* * *

.


	2. the all-seeing land

**.**

* * *

**A GIRL  
ii. the all-seeing land**

x

the blade will rip through the air first.

_please, wait, I don't want to die._

the only thing that will be in the way after that will be the body of the young girl who had, stupidly, fiercely stood in the blade's unceasing path a few seconds prior.

_I don't want to die_

it will then bite into her skin, ripping through the subcutaneous layer in an instant

_I don't want_

from there, it's a simple matter of travelling remorselessly through the tight-bound, lean layer of neck muscle before following through to dig into her trachea.

_I don't_

there will not be much biomaterial after that to stop the impact, so it won't.

_I_

x

In the ten seconds afforded to her before her neck bleeds out into the dirt, she remembered ten years.

Vajrin Indra was named for the old legends. Her parents picked a name that meant she was as adamant as a diamond, and as irresistible as the thunder. She was born in a simpler time, when such a name was only a wish for good luck instead of a prayer.

She was three the day her world ended. She didn't fully remember it. What she had instead was a collection of blurs. The imprint of the white ferry on the sparkling sapphire waters outside of Gateon port. The scintillating scales of an enormous blue pokémon erupting out of the sea. A blast of heat, so hot, so bright, so painful on her face. Her mother pulling her from the rubble, running. One hand outstretched for Father.

x

That was Before. There was a chunk of time in Before, when the entire world, not just her, learned to be happy. She got the images of those sometimes, hints of them slipping into her dreams when she least expected them. She'd find herself crying, but she couldn't fully understand why.

Kana, her mother, took her on a nomadic journey across Orre. It wasn't by choice. When Gateon fell to shadow pokémon, the two of them stumbled over to Pyrite. When Pyrite proved too dangerous to raise a daughter who was just learning what it meant for her family to be less than three, they fled to the outer territories, to a land beyond the maps. When that failed, they went further.

From there, they moved again and again, until all that was left of a family of three was a wary, battle-hardened woman who saw an enemy in every pokémon and human, and a bright-eyed girl who learned the exact opposite. The little girl lost every home she ever had after the shadow gyarados razed her hometown, but you couldn't tell that she had the scars if you only looked at her face.

The smiling girl became the darling of every settlement they stayed in. She had a sort of optimism that survivors in Orre found quaint, something to be cherished and put on a shelf, like a cute pokémon without the threat that it might one day become a shadow.

By the time she was four, she'd moved forty-seven times. Not that she was counting.

x

It was at the age of five that she finally got the courage to ask about her father. Kana looked away.

They walked on eggshells around each other. Kana didn't believe that her daughter would ever truly have a place in this world that was learning to devour itself alive. And in turn, her daughter was learning what it meant to love and lose someone who had walled themselves off from loving and losing ever again.

The girl went by Rin, now. In her mother's native tongue, it meant cold, distant—everything she needed to be in this world in order to survive, and everything she still wasn't. There wasn't much trace of what her life used to be. She couldn't help but wonder if there was something missing, something spelled into the syllables of a name that was starting to sound foreign even to her own ears. Orre certainly didn't remember it.

But that didn't stop her from lying awake at night, staring at the crumbling ceiling above and rolling her full name on her tongue. _Vajrin,_ she would whisper. _I am Vajrin_. And with that seditious word came the memory of two parents who were nothing like the one she had now. She didn't understand why, but she understood the loss.

She was re-learning to spell now, and she practiced by writing letters, crudely, to a man she once remembered as father.

x

She didn't get toys growing up. They simply weren't necessary, so Kana didn't give them to her. And besides, everyone reasoned, what would a tiny girl do with creativity in a world like this?

And yet, trapped behind walls, a little girl's imagination had to wander. Rin reached for what she can find, scraps of a world that used to have more than she could have asked for, and started to create. She wasn't sure at first what caused the whisper, the drive, but by the time she was six, she'd built her first motor out of scraps in the junkyard. Machines were fascinating and boring to her in the same way that people weren't: they were predictable. Sparks followed the same path; charge always flowed one way.

x

It was at age seven that she finally made her first friend.

They talked all night and all day. While her mother spent the days and nights fighting to make her world safe, her new friend told her stories of far-off places, of fantasy and daydream. He kept her company when she played in the scrap heaps, gave her advice on how to wire the circuits up in the lights so she could read even at night. He even helped her practice her spelling out her letters to her father.

One night, he helped her sneak off to the walls of their settlement, encouraged her to climb to the top. He showed her the constellations and told her of how far, far away they truly were, so far that it took the light years to cross down to her. She threw a letter to her father from the wall, watched it vanish into the night and hoped it would reach him. Her friend told her tales of the wide, wide universe, and he told her a great many stories that were laced in the stars. There was the little boy who flew a small biplane and discovered a floating castle in the clouds. Here was the woman who befriended Suicune and learned of their true nature; fought alongside them to defend against the forest's black heart.

He sounded out the first syllables of his name to her, and then stopped, silent. Which was strange, because for a voice in her head he was normally quite well-spoken.

He was too scared to talk anywhere but in her mind, and he never did finish saying his full name, so she called him Shy.

x

When she was eight, Rin witnessed the first killing.

A growlithe leapt over the walls of Quartzite. The people screamed, but Kana didn't hesitate. She was a protector now, big and strong like the heroes Shy has been telling her about, and she impaled it with a piece of steel rebar.

The people cheered for her. Kana did a good thing, defending Quartzite. Guardians like her were the reason that they could stay in one place for as long as they had. This was good. Rin knew it. Pokémon were bad. They hurt humans. That was all they'd ever do, and all shadow pokémon needed to die if humans were ever to live peacefully in Orre.

Shy was awfully quiet that evening.

x

Her ninth birthday was a lonely affair. Kana was busy repairing the barricades around Quartzite from where a swarm of raticate almost broke through, so it was Shy's turn.

He sang her a quiet song from his homeland and told her a surprise story he'd saved just for her birthday. It was a special story about an enormous bird with beautiful, rainbow feathers. And the bird loved a little boy, and they played together, and the bird was happy. But one day the boy asked for some of the bird's rainbow tail, and the bird gave it, so that the boy would be happy. And the bird loved the boy. On a different day, the boy asked for some of the bird's rainbow wing, and the bird gave it, so that the boy would be happy. And the bird loved the boy, and—

It was at this point that Rin got distracted by a new transformer that she found in the engine they were taking apart, so Shy instead told her about a celebratory tradition from his childhood, where they celebrated their birthdays by producing massive showers of sparks from themselves to spread their joy outward, and taught Rin how to do that too.

x

Rin spent a lot of the next year thinking about how it was unfair that Shy didn't get a proper body. Listening to him talk to her, letting him whisper stories in her ears, imagining she was on his back to see the world. It was like there was a weight there that she wouldn't ever quite get back, something she was missing but—

_father? when will you come home?_

—and it was certainly not fair to Shy, who had no body at all.

She decided to make him one, to pass the time. Kana was starting to say that Rin was too old for imaginary friends, so Rin decided to prove once and for all that he wasn't imaginary at all.

What she created instead was lopsided and hacked together; there was a seam in the engine that powered his core that threatened to burst his entire hull, and yet it stood together. Hulking and humanoid with massive, exaggerated features, it stood. She gave it big hands, to help her create.

In return, Shy told her a story of a faraway land filled with longago people. They had once created machines like this one, and in the cores of those engines they believed their resided a _soul_. They shaped each of these creations to be guardians, not warriors. The difference was important, you see. A warrior had weapons, for fighting and killing. But a guardian had nothing more than its body, for the strength of a guardian was in its heart.

Later, she would ask him what happened to those longago people who lived faraway, and the answer was quite sad indeed. But for now, Rin rolled a new name across her tongue, the name that Shy told her came with the his new form. He flexed his overlarge fingers, ran one of his hands over the crack before his beating heart. In the voicebox that replaced his tongue, he hesitantly grated out the name for his new body.

_Golurk._

In a very quiet, very small voice, so she wasn't demanding like the boy in the story, she asked Shy if he could use his new legs to jump the walls out of Quartzite and take a letter to her father.

x

At age eleven, Rin saw Cipher for the first time.

She was ushered inside before the talks began, but she asked Shy to go listen for her, so he did.

What he told her was quite surprising: Cipher wanted them to kill as many shadow pokémon as they could, and Cipher would pay them for it.

That didn't make much sense, she told Shy, because they were already killing as many shadow pokémon as they could. That was sort of the whole point.

That didn't make much sense, Shy told her back, because shadow pokémon didn't deserve to die, and Cipher had created them.

Rin made the mistake of repeating this out loud.

No one from Quartzite heard, but the gaunt, silvery-blue man from Cipher swiveled his head to stare. Then he smiled at her with sharp, pointed teeth.

x

She was twelve when shadow pokémon overran their new settlement. The day before that was the last day that she was truly allowed to be happy.

The next day, Quartzite was wiped out by shadow pokémon who brought thunder and blood. Rin was the only survivor, until she met the stranger with the sword, and then she wasn't.

And the day after that, Vajrin Indra woke up in the reverse of the situation she'd spent the past ten years learning. She blinked her tired eyes open and found that instead of she and Shy borrowing her body, they were piloting his. They were both guardians now.

Sometime along the years, on a day she couldn't remember, Orre took away Rin's ability to call herself "Vajrin".

This was the day she stopped being able to call herself "I".

x

* * *

.


	3. except for the birds

**.**

* * *

**A GHOST  
iii. except for the birds**

...

First: _all things considered, they lived quite a lot longer than he expected to._

Second: _not this, not again._

Shy spends the ten seconds Vajrin has before she bleeds out into the dirt weighing these two thoughts. He hopes that she spends hers better.

He doesn't quite know how the humans told their stories, but his kind is supposed to be born in the heart of a storm, when the clouds come so dark and thick that it seems like the sea itself has descended from the skies. When nature's wrath meets human desperation, and a bolt of lightning heralds the birth of something new and altogether different, monstrous.

Naturally, this being Orre, it has been quite a long time since that last happened. Unnaturally, instead of becoming Frankenstein's monster, after the most recent death, Shy was reborn into the heart of a human child.

As a result, Shy is probably more world-weary than he should've been: in a different life, if things had been different, he probably would've been as short-fused and fleeting as the lightning that gave him breath. Now, though, he finds that he's slowed a bit—not too much, mind you—enough to recognize the beauty in the small things that inch around him. He's lightning in a bottle now, a snapshot of a spark, frozen in a way that wasn't quite meant to be. Time has tempered him a little, perhaps enough for him to accept his current state of affairs.

They were always going to lose the fight with the swordswoman. That was a strange realization for him to make, early on, when he saw the intent to kill in their enemy's eyes and the way she wielded her weapon with impossible proficiency.

That's the one trait of humanity he'd never be able to understand, no matter how many years he's spent trapped in their skins and souls: humans fight for all sorts of reasons. Pokémon engage in combat because it is their way of life. It's how they express themselves to one another, their universal language that spans across their hundreds of species. It is their mother tongue, already known before the hatchling has even shed the pieces of its eggshell from its body.

He's not entirely sure why, but he often finds that humans are cute in that way—they have little bells on their houses that they ring when they want to talk to each other; they make musical repetitions with their mouths when they want to say they were happy; they make water from their eyes when they are sad. There are more spoken words for humans to say how they feel about Mondays than most manectric say in their entire lives, for example. Pokémon don't have any of that. The fight is all they know.

So coming to that understanding, that there is a fight that they've started and that they're going to _lose_, impossibly so, to a _human_, that they need to back down or they will perish—is something that Shy, in his many years of being alive, dead, pokémon, human, and something in between, has never felt before. Thunder and steel are not used to feeling the inevitable.

He doesn't fully understand faces, but there's no mistaking that look in the woman's eyes in the moments before she strikes. That is who she is, a fact of the universe as immutable as gravity. Even if he had his full power, and his full body, he _knows_: to fight her would be to lose.

He's tried to prepare Vajrin for a lot of things. It wasn't her fault that the soul of a pokémon landed in her body, after all. But he'd never prepared Rin for what it meant to put her life on the line. You have to _mean_ a sacrifice like that, and you can't just give that gift freely, but it's too late for regrets now.

It's to be expected. He's filled her up with stories about heroism and protecting the helpless and all of the fighting that he knew as a fledgling. Of course all that hot air makes her rise too close to the sun.

In the moment, his decision is the only possible one. Shy knows that. Hopefully, she understands as well. Her physical body would've been destroyed, and, unlike his, it isn't going to be coming back very easily. He isn't even sure if he would survive without her, if their mutualism was such that they needed to stay in her body. He'd hitchhiked onto her body, after all; it's not really clear if humans can casually fling their souls around different vessels. But there isn't any other choice, not if he wants to save her.

Vajrin Indra is many things—naïve, pragmatic, sheltered, adamant, guilty—but most of all, Shy knows that she is not someone who deserves to die. He might be able to leave and meld his soul onto another host, but if her spark of life is to be protected, desperate measures must be taken. She was kind to him, after all. She sheltered him, even unknowingly, when no one else would.

So he does the only thing he knows how, the only possible solution he sees to an impossible problem, and, in the seconds after the sword rips open her throat, he reverses their symbiosis. He's already resigned her to the inevitable when it happens: instead of his soul latching onto her body, as it had once, he reaches out and grabs her flagging spark and pulls, _pulls_ it into the twisted metal wreck of his golurk form. The souls of pokémon, human, and machine become one.

The pain flares to life. It's dull at first, slow and aching, and then inevitable. Trying to cram his soul into Vajrin's body was like trying to pour a bucket of water into a glass. There's too much. The metal shell helped scoop up all the pieces, but the container was never right; it doesn't feel right. He'd managed, over time, to come to terms with the inevitability of his prison. A glass of water filled to the brim, so to speak. So now that there are two of them in the space meant for half…

Cup runneth over. Wasn't that how the phrase went?

The swordswoman gives him something to focus on, something to keep him grounded in reality. A motivation to keep his thoughts in order, to dedicate every remaining facet of his soul into making sure that the golurk's eyes stay unlit, that he stays folded on the ground besides Vajrin. They cannot win this fight.

And yet the swordswoman is lost as well. Arm limply at her side, the tip of her blade glowing a faint red, her eyes dim and stay unlit. Her gaze is as blank as the one mirroring her from Vajrin's body, and she stays standing for a moment longer before collapsing heavily onto her knees.

There are words whispered at first, too frantic and choked for Shy to make out even if he weren't devoting his entire being into patching up as much of himself and Vajrin as possible. There's too much here, too _much_. He'd helped her build the golurk body as an extra space for the bits of him that couldn't fit in her heart, sort of like putting your antique furniture in the attic; but now they're bursting against the walls. And it's more complicated than that; the lines between them are starting to smudge out like a desert illusion.

Outside, there's the dim hunting call of a mightyena. It must've been drawn to the scent of blood scattered all across the horizon. Shy pivots his gaze back to the woman. She hasn't moved.

The swordswoman's breathing comes in harsh pants; the fingers that aren't wrapped around the sword have curled so tightly into themselves that he sees blood. But the rest of her is rigid as a statue, pale and still like marble. Her expression is carved deep into her face: grit jaw, wrinkled brow, flared nostrils. Twisted into an expression that he's seen on too many humans, too many times. Loathing.

For them? For Vajrin?

The call rings out again. Closer, this time. Close enough to echo distortedly against the remains of the wall that offered little protection from the final onslaught. The sound seems to rouse the swordswoman at last. She blinks, smudges a hand across her eyes, leaves a trail of blood and soot in its wake.

And then pauses, sword resting heavily in the ground. She still hasn't stood up. Tentatively, with the hand that isn't on her weapon, she reaches out. Her entire arm trembles as she grows closer, and her eyes are trained out in the distance, as if looking will make it real. She tucks Vajrin's hair away from her face, closes her lifeless eyelids. "I…" she husks out—

The howl sounds for a third time.

Despite his better instincts, Shy almost grates out a warning, but he's too slow. In a flash of dark shadow, a barrel of flesh and fur arcs through the air, fangs glinting like four diamonds nestled against the deep red of its gums. It's aimed like an arrow, straight at her throat, and for an instant Shy thinks that this is the end, that they'll all be lying in crimson together, as it tackles the unresponsive swordswoman to the ground.

The impact catches her in the chest, and the mightyena's claws punch straight through the ragged leather of her jacket as it bowls her into the ground and pins its full weight on top of her. And her eyes are still staring out distantly, even as the mightyena rears back to snap its jaws like a steel trap around her throat, even as her sword arm jerks up and slashes the wolf's exposed underbelly from sternum to hip.

Its eyes go wide. Shy averts his gaze, but he still hears the dull splatter of warm liquid falling onto dry earth, followed by a quiet thud of dead weight hitting fresh mud.

He doesn't dare reach out to Vajrin yet, not when they're still in such deep danger, but he mentally chalks this up to his ever-growing list of 'I told you so'. There was no winning this fight.

The woman's breathing slows and quiets, until it's no longer grating against the desert air and all he can hear are the labored whines of the mightyena. There's the quiet squelch of her boots as she approaches the mightyena, the whistle of steel through air, and then silence.

In the distance, more howls. Even if they've devolved into monstrosity, mightyena never hunt alone.

The woman doesn't say anything else, and she's moved now to where Shy can't see her face without turning. She doesn't turn back to Vajrin. Her dust-filled footsteps slowly fade off as she runs away.

He waits. Patience. He understands that about humans, if nothing else. There is a time and a place; that is how they have managed to eke out survival. The rest of the mightyena pack arrives, sniffs Vajrin's lifeless body, sniffs his own lifeless form, moves on. He lets their automaton body drift as the sun rises and sets above them, dimly aware of the passing of the world on the outside.

When the coast is finally clear, their spark flickers, and then the engine powering the golurk's core whirs to life.

_Rin?_ he asks tentatively. _Are you there?_

The resulting scream is so loud that it's actually quite stunning.

But they're alive. They're both still there. That's all that matters.

Shy pushes them upright. It's a bit laborious at first, what with the damage from their encounter with the electivire. And it's a bit distracting, too, what with the continuing screaming from the other half of his mind.

Hmmm. He probably should've told her about this earlier, explained what had happened. This probably wasn't the best way for her to find out. But how is he to explain this to a child? He was a pokémon, he died, and as his soul left him, he did the only reasonable thing and looked for a new body. There was the slight problem that the new body was nothing like the old body, and that someone else was currently in it, but every good solution came with a few snags. And Vajrin Indra as she was at the time was far too young for her body to house his entire soul, so he followed a recipe he'd heard one or two times before and helped her build an extra place for him to stick all the leftover bits of himself, where they wouldn't hurt anyone.

And now here they are again, trying the same trick, but with everything different. Humans used to move homes all the time; this was like taking a vacation.

_Rin?_ he tries again. _Rin, we're safe. You're safe._

He makes the mistake of looking up, which gives their mechanical eyes a perfect view of her former body sprawled limply across the ground, eyes closed, mouth open, blood pooling around her like a sheet of red velvet.

Shy guesses what will happen a second before it does, but he's too slow to stop Rin from re-asserting. She seizes control of their shared body on sheer reflex, clumsily.

She doesn't quite know how to stand at this height, unfortunately, so that leaves them frozen in mid-air for a moment. The next moment sees them plowing a furrow deep, deep into the ground. Five hundred pounds of clumsily-welded steel hit the sandy earth with a thud.

_It's okay_, Shy's telling her quietly, trying to be soothing. He projects the mental image of a bird flitting around the nest, chirping gentle songs to the hatchlings inside, but it's hard now. A lot of things are different now. He could speak to her mind before; now they've got a shared maze of circuitry that really wasn't meant to host this much complex thought. She was a bit more receptive before; now she's figured out how to vibrate the piezos in his voicebox and is using it to project a dull, monotone scream that echoes across the empty desert.

She was always so _smart_. And she is, even now, even when it's frustrating.

_Rin,_ he tries for a third time. _Rin, it's me. Shy._

The golurk's voicebox shuts off. Abruptly, the connection between them is stifled, sluggish. She doesn't answer when he prods her, doesn't even respond. Poor thing must be in shock.

Shy ponders this for a moment, in the slow, logical way that only a dying soul with no way to seek death might. It's only fair that she's confused by this whole situation, he decides. The fingers flex and uncurl thoughtfully. After all, _he_ sulked for quite a bit inside of her body before finally making his presence known.

Control of their body shifts back to him, and Shy is able to gingerly direct them back so that they're standing, not faceplanting alongside the body of the massive electivire, the matted mightenya, and the tiny girl.

Maybe it's the way the dying light casts harsh shadows, makes Vajrin look even smaller. Maybe it's because he's lived among the humans long enough for her thoughts to bleed into his, long enough for him to start to wonder about how mortals must feel about the end of their own tiny, insignificant lives. Or maybe it's just that the sudden trauma of today has rewired a synapse that he thought went dead long ago.

Shy looks at the empty eyes of a fledgling who should've been full of sparks, and _remembers_.

Long ago, when this land once was beautiful, pokémon and people alike used to look to the thunderstorm and worship it, because they knew what it meant. They recognized the divine when they saw it. There used to be three—the destroyer, the sustainer, the creator. They knew their roles, and so did every mortal that ever walked Orre.

It's hard, without her hands, and with the puncture holes in his sternum from where the electivire fried the welds out of him. But he manages to scoop her into his enormous palms, where her limp arms dangle around his neck. An albatross for an albatross.

Feeling her dead weight on his hull reminds him. She used to be more than this, and once, he was better than this too. She and him and every single pokémon and human in this entire world alike, until they're all thirsting, waiting for rain.

He looks away from the carnage on the ground and makes a tiny promise, one that's impossible as the storm that would give him life. He will right this wrong. He will bring her back.

Slowly, gingerly, he begins to walk. Feet plod heavily into the moonlit ground. Eyes point him north.

There's someone they need to see.

...

* * *

.


End file.
